MindStorm (Start-ups!) 2017 registration opens 10/26!

Reedies are famous for founding companies or being early employees at start-ups. Are you interested in how to start a company or nurture an idea to market? You can feed your inner entrepreneur at MindStorm (Start-ups!) on Friday, November 10, 4 - 6:30 pm.

Alumni entrepreneurs will pose everyday business challenges to teams of Reedies. You have 1.5 hours to work with your alumni "coach" and then present your findings. Great connections and practice for you. And pizza.

These are our Alumni entrepreneurs! Head to the bottom of the page to view their short bios.

Chris Anderson '02 (digital currency)

Mark Bitterman '95 (gourmet salt start-up)

Emily Corso '10 (fitness start-up)

Lennon Day-Reynolds '03 (software/ politics)

Marna Hauk '90 (ecopreneurship)

Will Landecker '06 (data science/ taxi app)

Brian Martin '81 (healthcare app)

Ben Rankin '87 (sustainable materials start-up)

Grant Reaber '99 (AI/ voice recognition/accent reduction app)

Michael Tippie '80 (bioscience entrepreneur)

Sign up starts on 10/26 (Thursday).

Alumni Entrepreneur Bios:

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson cofounded Couchbase in 2009, and grew the mobile database team until 2015. He's now Director of Product at Fauna, Inc., where he prioritizes features and discovers stakeholder requirements. He's a regular technology speaker at conferences like QCon London, Strange Loop, OSCON, ServerlessConf, Apache Con, Erlang Factory, Open Source Bridge, GOTO Copenhagen, JSConf, LXJS, Kings of Code, Foo Camp, and FOSS4G. He graduated Reed College in 2002 with a B.A. in philosophy. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Bitterman

CEO Mark Bitterman '95, has been a salt fanatic since his first bite of a juicy salt-studded steak at a truck stop in France, almost 30 years ago. His two companies, The Meadow and Bitterman Salt Co., offer places and products that connect people to flavor, culture, and the natural world. Mark is the James Beard Award winning author of five books, four of them on salt. His second book, Salt Block Cooking, has sold over 200,000 copies. Mark consults with Fortune 100 companies, teaches at institutions such as the Smithsonian and the Institute for Culinary Education, and collaborates with leading chefs from Japan to Ukraine. Mark has been featured inThe New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, O, GQ, Rachael Ray, Esquire, The Splendid Table, All Things Considered, Bizarre Foods, and major network TV and radio shows.

Emily Corso

Reed '10. Emily is the owner and head coach of Bold & Badass Fitness, a body-positive gym that delivers both fitness and personal growth through powerlifting-style workouts. Emily became interested in combat sports while at Reed and after graduating with a Religion degree, she became a professional MMA athlete. She started her own business so she could help others learn to call forth their own inner badasses in a fun and approachable gym atmosphere.

Lennon Day-Reynolds

Reed '03. Lennon has worked for small startups, large tech companies, and research groups since the late 90s. During that time he's focused on usability, developer productivity, and data analysis. Some of his better-known past employers include Sun Microsystems, Dark Horse Comics, Twitter, Urban Airship, and Stripe.

He's currently the co-owner of a tavern in SE Portland, an investor in multiple early-stage startups, and a staff engineer at the Democratic National Committee.

Marna Hauk

Marna Hauk, Ph.D., Reed '90, directs the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies in Portland, Oregon, innovating programs at the convergence of creativity, eco-restoration, and the living wisdom traditions. A postdoctoral scholar teaching graduate environmental justice, sustainability education, and climate change education at Prescott College, Dr. Hauk is a Community Climate Change Fellow with the North American Environmental Education Association, EE Capacity, and the Cornell Civic Ecology Lab through the EPA. With more than 70 peer-reviewed presentations and publications, she serves on the board of the Journal of Sustainability Education and recently coedited Community Climate Change Education: A Mosaic of Approaches (2017).

Will Landecker

Reed '06. Lyft's mission is to connect people through transportation and bring communities together. I am a data scientist on a couple different teams at Lyft. On the Growth team, I build algorithms and products that try to keep supply and demand in balance by predicting when and where we'll need drivers the most. On the Fraud team, I build systems that detect and prevent malicious use of our app in real time. My every-day toolkit includes machine learning, statistics, and optimization.

Brian Martin

Reed '81. Physician, computer scientist, founder & CEO, Recentia Health. Recentia Health believes that technology should be used to help physicians spend more time with their patients, and should support the physician's mission of providing the highest quality health care. To that end, we are building a national health records bank supporting a healthcare app ecosystem for third party developers. We are fostering the development of health care apps for physicians and patients by providing creative third party developers who specialize in user experience design with simple APIs to our patient knowledge base; we do the clinical and artificial intelligence heavy lifting necessary to properly manage patient knowledge bases, so that independent developers can focus on what they do best.

Ben Rankin

Reed '87. One of our enterprises is Columbia Straw Supply. It’s a support business for a project called Columbia Pulp. After several years of development work by us and others, Columbia Pulp recently closed on a $167 million financing. This money is being spent to construct an industrial plant which will use wheat straw, instead of chipped trees, to manufacture pulp for papermaking.

Wheat straw is a waste residual left standing in the field after the wheat is harvested; in some regions (including southeastern Washington State), the straw is very dense and the farmers typically burn their fields to remove it. The Columbia Pulp project gives those farmers another way to get rid of their straw, for which they get paid instead of incurring cost for burn permits and field operations.

Grant Reaber

I am starting a company to apply deep neural networks like WaveNet to speech processing. I have been working on accent conversion (changing people's accents), and my likely partners are Ukrainians who have been working on voice conversion (letting one person speak with the voice of another). One market for accent conversion is offshore call centers. Billions of dollars of call shore business have moved from India to the Philippines, and one of the main reasons is that American's can't understand or don't like Indian accents. One market for voice conversion is movie companies who could dub movies using the original voices and fewer voice actors.

I studied math, computer science, and philosophy at Reed and in grad school, ultimately getting a PhD in philosophy. About a year and a half ago, I became fascinated by deep learning and especially by generative models, which are models that produce sounds and images rather than just classify them. I moved to Kiev partly because Ukraine is cheap and has good engineers.

Michael Tippie

I am a serial entrepreneur and seed stage investor in the life sciences. I don't touch a project if it doesn't have the prospects of significantly positively affecting human mortality and/or morbidity. A year ago I stepped down after 2.5 years as CEO of TomegaVax, a company out of the OHSU Primate Center, Picker lab, that had demonstrated long term effector memory T cell responses in 500 monkeys in half a dozen cancers and infectious diseases, as well as fundamental advances in Immunology. Last September we merged TomegaVax with a company that ARCH Ventures created for that purpose, Vir Biotechnology. Today, Vir announced the close of a $500 Million Series A financing as well as several strategic alliances.

At present, I am CEO of Lipidomics, a company out of Oregon State Dept of Pharmacy, Indra lab. The target is eczema and other inflammatory skin diseases and I am raising $5 Million for the company at present to do a clinical trial in eczema.

I am also a VP and Founder of Neuramedica, a medical device company utilizing bioresorbable clips custom designed and patented to close the dura of the spine during Neurosurgery, saving up to an hour of expensive OR time in the process and reducing the patient's exposure to Anaesthesia. The second product is to create the vaginal cuff during Hysterectomy, the hardest part of that surgery.

I am also working with my Partner, Duffy DuFresnse, another very experienced life sciences CEO, to build OmnEcoil, a medical device company founded by Fergus Coakley, MD, the Chair of Diagnostic Radiology at OHSU, to image and biopsy the prostate under MRI guidance in one procedure. We are raising a $500,000 to finish development of a prototype device ready for clinical studies.